A Selection from the Ark
Number 216 - Winter 2010
A TRUE STORY ABOUT A BIG MAN AND A LITTLE DOG

Visiting the
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., The Ark
editor Deborak Jones and I were intrigued by the statue of an alert
Scottish Terrier at Roosevelt’s feet. We had recently been talking
of the dogs each of us have loved and mourned and here, suddenly,
was a former American President making a similar statement about the
bond between human and canine – a message seen by millions of
visitors every year. I decided to do a little investigating on
Google.

Named ‘Murray, the Outlaw of Falahill’, after a
15th-century Scottish ancestor of the Roosevelts, the little black
dog known simply as Fala was born on 7 April 1940. There seems to
have been some hesitation by Eleanor to introduce another dog after
a previous Roosevelt dog bit visiting British Prime Minister Ramsey
McDonald. But the new puppy and the President bonded immediately
with Fala accompanying Roosevelt everywhere, sleeping in his bedroom
and being fed only by FDR. When Republicans claimed that Roosevelt
had carelessly left Fala behind on an Aleutian island and then spent
millions sending a destroyer to rescue him, Roosevelt reclaimed the
high ground in a humorous speech in which he declared ‘a right to
resent, to object to, libellous statements about my dog’.

Fala
‘The Informer’

In December 1941 representatives of 26 nations at
war with the Axis signed ‘A Declaration by the United Nations’ in
Roosevelt’s White House study with Fala in attendance but, as it was
late at night, infamously snoring loudly. Despite this faux pas,
Fala – wearing a collar engraved ‘Fala, the White House’ – was made
an honorary private in the US Army after he began (according to the
White House) contributing a dollar a day to the war effort.
Meanwhile the little terrier travelled extensively with Roosevelt
by train and ship as well as in the presidential airplane ‘Sacred
Cow’. Because Fala needed to be walked during presidential train
travel, thus alerting local citizens to the visitor from Washington,
the Secret Service codenamed Fala ‘The Informer’. A movie was made
about him in 1941 after which thousands of adoring fans wrote to him
and it became necessary to engage a secretary to respond to the
correspondence.

Fala is said never to have recovered from FDR’s
death in April 1945. He spent his remaining years with Eleanor and
his grandson Tamas McFala at Val-Kill in New York state, rushing out
in joyful anticipation when a cavalcade of cars came up the drive.
When Fala died on 5 April 1952, he was buried near President
Roosevelt in the rose garden at Hyde Park, New York.